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Accelerating Price Decay, Embrace It

Accelerating price decay in tech is a given and is a fact of life in tech. Warnings about price drops in memory are for those that fear the obvious, for when has almost any technology not dropped in price at an ever accelerating rate? As our ability to accelerate research is fed by the increasing speed to develop new research from having ever better tools to create and collaborate over much broader scales, the price will drop just due to supply and demand. Price drops do have a silver lining and that is as the price drops, the market increases as it becomes more economic over broader applications. When has the price of technology not dropped?

All this has lead to fantastic and almost mind boggling applications to autonomous cars, space travel, ever more versatile smart phones and the increasing penetration of technologies into everything.

Memory is the latest and most current example of this fear. Sometimes products do get ahead of themselves and if they get to far ahead the price drops can get extreme, but due to the laws of economics this will be self correcting through a slow down in production and at the same time an increase in the breadth and depth of the market. It will be interesting to see what happens in the memory market, since every company in it has seen nothing short of massive price drops over the last forty years with no end in sight. I myself can see numerous new and mature markets that could suck up tremendous amounts of this "Excess Memory".

Truly embracing this will require a number of multiple talents or perhaps even an AI to automate it, for the skills required for the needed strategies will be broad and deep. I see this as becoming a field in itself.

Just like everything in the tech sector, the price drops are accelerating and this is just one part of the "Great Acceleration". Everyone in the business end of the tech sector knows this and those that don't take it into account go out of business in due time. The true winners are those that learn how to embrace ever lower prices for an ever improving product. Memory is no exception and every year we see more and more applications for solid state memory. This trend in tech and the business of tech is the ultimate application of the Darwin model of survival of the fittest. Any company, especially a tech company that doesn't embrace a permanent culture of faster, better, cheaper is doomed to failure. Those that embrace and work strategically with their products with a vision of the greater ecosystem will be the winners and this has to be engrained in the very DNA of the organization for this process is ongoing and part of living in the age of the "Great Acceleration". Memory is just one of the major battle fields this survival of the fittest and smartest will play out.